Nick's Hotaru CMS Blog

Let me start with a little background about myself, so you know whose blog you're reading. I run a popular social bookmarking website, JapanSoc, a site dedicated to all things Japan, which is where I live. JapanSoc started life on the Pligg Content Management System before I upgraded it to Social Web CMS, a faster, more secure and robust version of Pligg.

I'm a huge fan of SWCMS. I've contributed over 600 forum posts and 20 modules to the project, but I've decided to use my newfound knowledge of PHP to create something completely new, something fun and flexible. Let me introduce Hotaru CMS.

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Hotaru is really just a shell. Into that shell you will be able to plug in various components. These "plugins" will vary in size and power, which will most likely be categorized as tier 1 and tier 2 plugins. A tier 1 plugin will be an essential core component such as "users", "stories" or "votes". Tier 2 plugins will typically be non-essential, rather like Wordpress plugins. The reasoning behind isolating "votes" (etc.) as tier 1 plugins is that they can be replaced by alternatives, therefore changing the entire nature of the CMS.

The image above shows the drag 'n' drop interface in the Admin section which is used to activate or deactive plugins.

Themes will be done completely in PHP, so if you're familiar with editing Wordpress themes, you'll find Hotaru templates easy to customize. However, custom themes will sit on top of a default theme, so if there are any files you don't need to customize, you don't need to include them - Hotaru will fetch them from the default theme instead, therefore keeping custom themes small, manageable and easy to create.

Well, that pretty much explains my vision of Hotaru CMS. It's really too early to be sure about anything, but if you'd like to follow along, you can tap into the SVN here on Assembla. If you'd like to get involved with coding Hotaru, send me PM.